Except that the MegaDrive/Genesis had lots of great games and didn't suffer from horrible slowdown, and had superior audio to the SNES/SFC by a mile as far as FM is concerned..
By and large though, aside from a few gems like the Ecco series, Knuckles Chaotix, Kolibri, and T-Mek the Sega CD and 32X were disastrous as far as games went, the Saturn while being a very powerful machine made very little design sense. The Jaguar bit .. Right on the money. "You aren't 64-bit get the fuck out of here."
True. Neither did the Super NES, except for a few poorly architected programs.
Slowdowns, no. Though I always thought SNES games in general - I'm sure there are exceptions - felt kind of slow when compared to Megadrive games. That is coming from a 12-year-old me who didn't even know or understand the hardware differences.
Are you implying that FM > samples?
That's subjective, I prefer the SNES audio. Technically, the SNES is superior in that department.
The Genesis (or MegaDrive) VS SNES debate can go for long, however if there is ONE departement where the SNES crushes down the Genesis to it's doom it's without a doubt the sound. Nothing is worse than FM to my pesonnal point of view, exept if you only like Techno songs.
As I've said before, FM can be great if you know what you're doing and if you only attempt certain kinds of sounds. Sonic 3, for example, pulls off some absolutely jaw-dropping stuff, and the only samples used are the drums (which are, admittedly, hard to get even close to right with FM.) The problem is that a lot of Genesis musicians didn't know what they were doing and/or attempted sounds that you really just can't do with the Genesis FM chip. DOOM 32x is a particularily egregious example of this.
Also, the SNES does suffer from slowdown on some games (Mega Man X is particularily notorious for it.) I haven't run into slowdown on any of the Genesis games I've played, but I haven't played as many Genesis games as I have SNES games. Generally it's just due to the fact that the SNES runs at less than half the speed of the Genesis.
[size=0]"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
- P.J. O'Rourke[/size]
commodorejohn wrote:Also, the SNES does suffer from slowdown on some games (Mega Man X is particularily notorious for it.)
All this shows is that Capcom's first engine on any platform is slow. This was the case with Mega Man for NES as well.
I haven't run into slowdown on any of the Genesis games I've played, but I haven't played as many Genesis games as I have SNES games. Generally it's just due to the fact that the SNES runs at less than half the speed of the Genesis.
A few things make direct speed comparisons difficult:
The Genesis MC68000 is clocked twice as fast as the Super NES 65C816.
MC68000 internal and external data buses are twice as wide as those on the 65C816, so 16-bit really means 16-bit.
But the MC68000 can't access memory on every CPU cycle, which is one difference that Nintendo Power used in its article that debunked the "Blast Processing" myth.
Items 1 and 3 also applied to the Z80 in the Sega Master System vs. the 6502 in the NES.
About colors, SuperNES is much better. The sound output might be polemic, as the Sega Genesis can bring arcade fidelity (Street Fighter games) on sound and graphics animation.
Please pardon the length of this post. This is how I break it down:
CPU: This is the most important factor for me. MD/Genesis games were able to take advantage of vastly superior processing power, including a superior processor architecture, higher clock frequency, full 16-bit bus, faster RAM, and higher-speed access to the cartridge ROM. While the 6502/65c816 architecture is very well designed at such a low clockrate it doesn't have much chance to compete. If you wish to compare the architectures directly you may do so by putting the PC-Engine's ~7 MHz 6502 variant alongside the MD's 68000 at ~7.7 MHz. The clockrate disparity is small but the performance difference is significantly in favor of the 68K in this scenario.
What that boils down to is more onscreen enemies and bullets in shooters like Gleylancer, the Thunder Force series and M.U.S.H.A. with little to no slowdown, complex scenes made of MANY sprites like in 'Sprite 3D' games such as Panorama Cotton, hordes of enemies attacking you at once while maintaining 60 FPS in Gunstar Heroes, et cetera. Games can be faster-paced and more reflex-testing than most titles on the SNES/SFC. But it doesn't all boil down to 'lots of sprites'. Object movement can be more complex, e.g. more objects moving in sinusoidal or other complex trigonometric patterns for more fluid and dynamic movement.
The SNES/SFC's CPU is by no means 'slow', but it's not up to par for a console built in 1991, when the MegaDrive was on the market in '89. The end result is games with more slowdown and platformers/shooters that, while they can be rather complex, lose a lot of their intensity of gameplay in the mix. Bosses are simpler, multisegment bosses in particular are less prevalent and their movement is more restricted. Comparing a platformer like Gunstar Heroes or Contra Hard Corps to Contra 3 or Sparkster or another SFC/SNES platformer will reveal simpler bosses, slower movement, smaller sprites and less utilization of many onscreen objects with complex movement algorithms.
Graphics: The SFC/SNES shows its strength in being a newer design and Nintendo's expertise in building excellent custom ASICs to suit their needs. The graphical capabilities of the SNES/SFC far exceed those of the MD's, with support for a much wider color palette, limited scaling/rotation support (doesn't work on all graphical layers), nice features like the famed "Mode 7". While the MegaDrive/Gen shows its strength in using a powerful off the shelf CPU and audio subsystem, the SFC/SNES shows the superiority of a custom-designed graphics subsystem in a console. However it does have some inferiorities to the MD in the graphical department, namely reduced resolution (higher resolutions are available, but due to the CPU bottleneck these are unfeasible to use in most circumstances) and the fact that despite higher graphical capability exists the CPU must process all onscreen objects, so they tend to be smaller and composed of fewer sprites than their MD/Gen equivalents.
Audio: This is a big preference thing. I prefer the sound of FM as, when used properly, you can produce very complex and stylized instruments all your own with a unique and distinctive sound. A game's music and sound effects take on a life of their own fully realized within the imagination of their composer. With PCM, which the SNES/SFC relies almost exclusively on, all audio is prerecorded. I feel this cheapens the sound and reduces the creativity the developers can express with it, as instruments sound repeated like they were coming from a MIDI synth-- less dynamic. Some games made excellent use of PCM, to their credit, but ultimately I find PCM audio better suits 32-bit consoles and beyond more, and the universal disadvantages namely cost of Sony's audio hardware and the cost of increased ROM size making SFC/SNES games VERY expensive remain.
For me, the MD has the winning combo here; combining a terrific PSG from the Master System, which has the strengths of complex and great-sounding NES audio, with a high-end FM synthesizer from Yamaha (YM2612), plus a DAC that when used correctly could produce PCM nearly as high quality as the SNES/SFC when needed. But in the end it will come down to what sort of ears you've got on your head.
What it all boils down to is that both systems are very powerful but their focus is much different in regards to what they will excel at. If you are looking for fast, reflex-testing high intensity shooters and platformers like me-- Sonic, Ecco, Gunstar Heroes, Vectorman, Gleylancer, Rocket Knight Adventures/Sparkster, M.U.S.H.A., Thunder Force, Panorama Cotton, games like those ... you won't be able to reproduce them effectively on the SFC/SNES. While the SFC/SNES' biggest strengths are games with heavy graphical complexity-- RPGs, titles like Mario Kart that rely on heavy use of the SNES' special graphical features, or slower but graphically-intensive plaformers like the Megaman series.
However, you can't knock the TurboGrafx! It's "got the arcade feel!"
[size=0]"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
- P.J. O'Rourke[/size]
Also how do you know every PCE game you've played isn't running at 1.79 MHz just like NES? Are you talking about Super CD or Arcade CD games or just HuCards? (I think Hucards mostly ran at 1.79MHz due to ROM speeds...)
One could also argue that SNES had a faster bus since it could access the bus every cycle and the 68K often accesses it 2 or 3 times during a 14 cycle instruction. GEN needs 200ns ROMs while SNES running at 1.79MHz needs 200ns ROMs; 3.58MHz needs 120ns. Games which use the SA-1 have a full 16-bit bus as well.
I also have yet to find a dual platform game where the GEN version looks better (less sprites on SNES and all.) I think the dual platform games also really show how much SNES shines over GEN in the music dept. Some good examples off the top of my head are the Earthworm Jim and Mortal Kombat series.
I'm not junking the Sega Genesis, but the main problem is the color. SuperNES games have more colors. The (SNES) sound, as I said, isn't the same if you compare with the arcade: the Genesis has fidelity, but this doesn't imply quality - quite poor.
